School district working to balance numbers

One of the items discussed at length during Monday’s regular Newton Community School District Board of Education meeting was consideration of adding a board policy regarding class and grade-level size goals within the district.

Prompted by a discrepancy between the enrollments at Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson elementary schools, the board discussed potential policy changes that would create a way to even out enrollment. Several methods, technicalities and procedural issues were discussed — along with recent history that included paying a Kansas consulting firm to help crunch data for re-drawing boundaries earlier this year.

Data showed Woodrow Wilson would have a larger number of fourth-graders on its campus, while one of its neighboring K-4 elementary schools, Emerson Hough, would have more students overall in the years ahead. Any policy change wouldn’t impact where students attend school in 2016-17.

The latest enrollment figures for Woodrow Wilson show the school has 291 students, including 65 fourth-graders, while Thomas Jefferson is at 251 without counting the 129 preschoolers, and only 46 fourth-graders. The district and the consulting firm worked with a goal of 275 students on each of the K-4 campuses.

One of the main driving forces behind the Newton Community School District’s recent reconfiguration has been trying to keep class sizes small in the lowest grades. Board member Donna Cook asked Superintendent Bob Callaghan if the current discrepancy in enrollment was the exact problem the district had been trying to resolve by reconfiguring the elementary grades this year into four K-4 schools.

“Probably similar, yes, to a lesser degree,” Callaghan said. “We’re talking about getting classes down to 18 or 20, whereas last year, (Woodrow Wilson Principal) Todd (Schuster) had some classes as big as 26 or 27.”

Callaghan suggested what he described as a three-prong approach: voluntary transfers, “targeted” voluntary transfers and re-drawing the attendance boundary for Woodrow Wilson. The last option, Callaghan said, would require board action.

Board policy 501.3 calls for the superintendent or designee, using current and projected data, presents potential elementary school boundaries and attendance zones to the board for approval.

The superintendent also said the district’s plan is to begin completing the upcoming school year’s registration in the spring, as opposed to the summer, to collect better data. He said even though 2016-17 is unique in that the board re-drew district boundaries and reconfigured, he’d like to see more data on student residences before drafting a policy.

“I don’t want to be doing this every year,” Callaghan said.

Board members Robyn Friedman and Andy Elbert brought up whether special education and low socio-economic status at each schools, along with having the district’s entire behavioral disorder program located at Woodrow Wilson, should be factored into “weighting” how many students would be best at each school.

The board took no action Monday, and has no plans to do so any time soon. Callaghan said the Nov. 28 board meeting would be the earliest time he could collect and use data to craft a policy about class and grade sizes.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com